And part of my 2025 book, Alternative for the Masses: The ’90s Alt-Rock Revolution – An Oral History, certainly digs deep into this topic.
Below is an excerpt from early in the book, in which such renowned names as Ian MacKaye, Fred Armisen, and Matt Pinfield (among many others) recall what the indie music scene was like at the time, and the stepping stones that led us to late 1991 – when alt-rock seemingly exploded on a global scale.
MATT JOHNSON (Jeff Buckley drummer): In the late ’80s, I had moved to New York from Houston. Eventually, I became a working drummer playing in local bands. I had a short internship at the Looking Glass, which is Phillip Glass’s studio on Lower Broadway. I met some various musicians, and I remember this guy, John Moran, walked by outside—I was in a bar on Avenue A and First Street. And he was with Rebecca Moore—I believe Jeff Buckley’s girlfriend at that exact time.
So, I ran out there to say hi to John, and that’s where I met Rebecca. And then John mentioned to Rebecca that I was a drummer, and she said, “Let me get your number.” And lo and behold, I got a phone call from Jeff a day or two later on my answering machine. I met Jeff at Context Studios [in Williamsburg, Brooklyn]. We played together, and I believe at that time we started to create what eventually became “Dream Brother”—probably at that first rehearsal/audition.
CHAD TAYLOR (Live guitarist): There were a handful of worthy artists and bands [near York, Pennsylvania]—all featured performers at the Chameleon Club. Suddenly, Tammy! was amongst my favorites, along with Innocence Mission. The band Ocean Blue was also from our region and did well.
CRAIG WEDREN (Shudder to Think singer/guitarist): The late ’80s and early ’90s were pretty fascinating to me in terms of what was going on in the D.C. underground music scene. Dischord had started in the early ’80s. I was living in Cleveland at the
…everybody was growing up—it was a bunch of kids who were in their early teens in the early ’80s and were now getting into their late teens in the mid-to-late ’80s. The older you got, the more omnivorous you get.
time . . . I was only vaguely aware of Minor Threat and Bad Brains. I moved there in ’85, at the end of what would be termed “revolution summer,” which was Rites of Spring and the second wave of D.C. hardcore. And it was more impressionistic and a little more . . . not overtly psychedelic, but there was an experimentation to it. And everybody was growing up—it was a bunch of kids who were in their early teens in the early ’80s and were now getting into their late teens in the mid-to-late ’80s. The older you got, the more omnivorous you get. It was okay to admit you loved the Beatles. Whereas that was verboten before. So, this sort of expansive creativity or attitude toward experimentation in the D.C. underground really kicked in in the Dischord world at that point.
In Cleveland, you took whatever you could get. There weren’t enough weirdos to be strict about “Well, I’m into hardcore.” “Well, I’m into ska.” “Well, I’m into noise.” It was just one bunch of freaks. So, when I joined Shudder to Think, it was during that phase of D.C. music that was already starting to open up. The minute we started playing together, it was very clear that there was something different happening—the combination of sensibilities, the sounds, my voice, and lyric style. And fortunately, everybody in the band agreed that originality and inventiveness would be a premium. And I think there was a lot of that mentality happening in young bands in D.C. in the late ’80s. So, by 1990, there were so many different types of bands in D.C. and in the Dischord stable between Shudder to Think, Jawbox, and Fugazi. That’s a pretty wide variety of music right there already.
IAN MacKAYE (Fugazi singer/guitarist, co-owner of Dischord Records): Dischord Records largely exists in our own zone. In the forty-plus years since we put out our first record, we’ve never used contracts and never had a lawyer. And Fugazi . . . I don’t think any other bands operated like us. As a result, I think I have a really weird perspective on the music business. Fugazi never had a manager or relied on a booking agent; we never toured on a bus and never used setlists. We were a weird fuckin’ band.
CRAIG WEDREN: We were close—and still are—with Dave Grohl because he was part of the D.C. scene. He played in the band Scream; he had a band called Dain Bramage. And we were the same age—he was dating a girl in my class, and we went to the prom together. We were all buds. And I would go see any band he was playing in just to watch him play drums, because it was so electric.
JASON PETTIGREW (Alternative Press magazine writer and editor): Being in Cleveland [where Alternative Press was based], you weren’t commercial enough for L.A., you weren’t cool enough for New York. We generally wrote about stuff that was different. And hopefully, we could pull somebody away from their parents’ classic rock records long enough to get them hooked on something else.
PAGE HAMILTON (Helmet singer/guitarist): Madison [Wisconsin] had—because of Smart Studios—a cool part of the world, too. There were little pockets like Chicago, Madison, Minneapolis, New York, and Seattle—where there were scenes.
BILL GOULD (Faith No More bassist): I grew up in Hollywood in the late ’70s/early ’80s. And it was like mods and rockers. There were hair bands and there were punks. And I was on the side of the punks. So, on a very cultural level, I always saw the hair bands as “the other.” Kind of the enemy. Those were the guys that drove the pickup trucks and would kick our ass.
FAT MIKE (NOFX singer/bassist): Los Angeles was the most violent music scene of all time. There were punk gangs: There was the Suicidal Tendencies gang; there was FFF, the L.A. Death Squad, and Burbank Punk Organization. The main reason I left L.A. is because I went to see the Dickies at a nightclub in Santa Monica, and I knew some Suicidals, and my friend got stabbed in the lung at the show. They didn’t know him—they just knew he wasn’t from Venice. My friends got beat up with golf clubs. Y’know, punk rockers beating other punk rockers.
And the cops would mace us. I got arrested—only once, in Hollywood—but for nothing. But that was every punk show. It wasn’t until the late ’80s when Fugazi and Bad Religion came out. Bad Religion put out the best-selling record that year in punk [No Control]. Do you know how many it sold? Ten thousand. And we couldn’t believe they sold ten thousand because NOFX sold two thousand in ’89. So, what was the punk scene like in L.A.? It was the most horrific, violent scene. I moved to San Francisco after my friend got stabbed.
MATT PINFIELD (MTV VJ, host of MTV’s 120 Minutes): [Drummer] Matt Sorum found Tori Amos playing by the LAX Airport in a hotel. He heard her, and he was so blown away by her piano playing that he was like, “Hey, we need to start a band together!” And basically, they started the band Y Kant Tori Read. That record [1988’s self-titled] didn’t really do anything, but Jason Flom ended up signing her to Atlantic—by telling her that he didn’t want the whole band, he wanted her to do her own thing. And then, Little Earthquakes came next.
MOBY (Solo artist/DJ/remixer): And then overnight, we realized there were these nerdy alternative rockers in Seattle—who also had been listening to Black Sabbath.
KEVIN MARTIN (Candlebox singer): I moved to Seattle in 1984. My dad took a job up there. It was right when all the grunge music was starting to happen. Chris Cornell was still playing drums when I saw Soundgarden—they were a three-piece.
BILL GOULD: When we played in Seattle, I think the first time was 1985/1986 at the Central Tavern. It was us, Skin Yard—Jack Endino’s band—and Soundgarden. There were only like thirty people there. We went with Soundgarden to play Ellensburg, Washington, and I think that the guys from Screaming Trees came to that show and started a band after that. It wasn’t like a movement—they were just friends of ours up there that we’d play with. And things gathered steam. I remember the first time I heard Nirvana; Nirvana seemed like kids coming from that world, basically.
CHRIS HASKETT (Rollins Band guitarist): Soundgarden were the first of “us” to get signed. They got signed to a major label [A&M] in, like, 1988. We were all like, “Whoa! How did that happen?” That kind of put them in a different world.
COREY GLOVER (Living Colour singer): We did a show in Albany, New York, once; and Soundgarden opened. And it was the most amazing shit I’ve ever seen in my life. I thought that Chris Cornell was amazing. I thought the band was overly talented—too talented for the room.
FRED ARMISEN (actor/comedian [Portlandia, Documentary Now!, Saturday Night Live], Trenchmouth drummer): I think when I saw Mudhoney’s records—that looked like a different movement was happening. It didn’t seem like the same kind of “college rock/ alternative” bands that were coming out. Even without hearing them, I could tell there was something happening. Then of course, there were these other genres starting to happen in the late ’80s.
I feel like industrial had its own look—the Wax Trax! scene and all that. That seemed like something different than college/alternative. What I mean by “college/alternative” is the Smithereens, 10,000 Maniacs, and maybe even the Sugarcubes—somewhere in there, that’s what seemed like alternative. Aside from the jangle of the sound, I would say that the Smithereens also had a distorted sound. Which at the time, was not being played on every radio station. I see them as less jangly and a little harder than that. I loved it all, but Mudhoney caught my eye as, “Oh . . . what’s happening here?”
EDDIE “KING” ROESER (Urge Overkill singer/bassist): We formed in a microcosm, where I kind of showed up on the campus of Northwestern from a small town in Minnesota. I was unaware of the scene in Minneapolis—at the time, the Replacements and Hüsker Dü were thriving. And I lived far away, and there was no place to even get a fanzine where I grew up. So, I grew up almost unaware of any underground punk rock thing. A pal of mine had things that were more public—I was aware of the Sex Pistols and things like that.
The main thing in my life that was happening was that I became aware of Big Black, as there was this sort of raconteur on campus who wrote for The Daily Northwestern and was a known figure as being an outspokenly public asshole. The first person that I was aware of being publicly against the grain. By the time I showed up there, Steve Albini was on his way out, and I ended up at this tiny on-campus place where I saw a version of Urge Overkill. It was their last show, basically. And Big Black played one of their first shows—I think it was Steve and a drum machine.
I can’t even say what was happening in Chicago, but through meeting [Urge Overkill bandmate] Nash [Kato] and Steve, I was aware of stuff like Naked Raygun. And Ministry—I think Al Jourgensen was a guy that Steve actually played music with
…we’re talking mid-’80s. It was a very tiny world of misfits and dreamers. It’s basically a bunch of Asperger’s patients who didn’t know how to have fun and had very antisocial tendencies.
him a couple of times. It was sort of a nascent scene in Chicago, and while I was there, I was able to see a few things that were important to me—I saw Naked Raygun open for the Replacements, and I think there were about twenty people there. Steve was the guy who said, “You can actually rent a studio and make a record.” We recorded a record that Steve helped finance. It was recorded in 1984—it came out on Steve’s label, Ruthless [1986’s Strange, I . . .]. He was an entrepreneur in the world of punk rock. Everybody else was not capable being able to pay attention and see a project through. Steve was the guy who did that.
Corey Rusk started the label Touch and Go in Detroit, and his presence on the scene was very important. And somehow, Steve hooked up with them. I don’t know how they met the Butthole Surfers, but that was in the mix as well. So, we’re talking mid-’80s. It was a very tiny world of misfits and dreamers. It’s basically a bunch of Asperger’s patients who didn’t know how to have fun and had very antisocial tendencies. I mean, Touch and Go parties at the time, people would grill a bunch of meat and you could probably count the words said among people in the hundreds, because no one knew how to communicate or have fun.
And then these freaks from Texas showed up. Scratch Acid were in the mix. Those guys came to Chicago, and Jesus Lizard was a later thing. But Steve left the campus area, bought a house, and decided he wanted to become a professional recordist and blaze his own trail. And because we were in the mix early enough and we were all pals, one of our first tours, Steve rented a van and played in Kentucky and had Squirrel Bait play, and the first version of Urge went along with them. This was our entire world: the nascent Touch and Go scene.
The biggest band on earth to me at the time was Sonic Youth. And Steve had a relationship with them. When they came to town, we went to the park and had a barbecue. But there was no intimation that anything involved with punk rock would become something that anybody was going to care about. It was the place to go if you were a loser or a misfit. It was for its own entertainment.
We recorded a version of “Wichita Lineman” with Steve. And Steve got it to Corey, and he’s like, “I would like to put this single out.” We couldn’t even believe that we had a label that wasn’t Steve. Nash, his real interest was arts and graphic design. He designed the Touch and Go logo.
TANYA DONELLY (Belly, The Breeders, and Throwing Muses singer/guitarist): At that point, there were so many bands [in Boston] from the late ’80s to the early ’90s— Pixies, Throwing Muses, Uzi, the Neats. Any given bill on any given night would have been wildly eclectic. And it was a joyful thing. It would be the Blake Babies and Dinosaur Jr., and Throwing Muses and Pixies played together quite a lot. But then there were the “Mission of Burma breakout bands” like Birdsongs of the Mesozoic.
At the time, I know this sounds naïve, but we weren’t focused on being female in music. But when I look back now, I’m like, “There was a healthy percentage of women driving the scene at the time.” And that is something also that I think was unique to that era—and specifically to Boston and London at the time. There were pockets everywhere, obviously; but Boston was so female-rich. I feel that that was something that I sort of took for granted at the time. It was easily 50/50 at that time.
PAUL Q. KOLDERIE (Producer [Dinosaur Jr., Radiohead, Hole, Morphine]): When Fort Apache Studios started, we were just a local eight-track studio in Boston. It was starting at ground zero from nothing. All of us were musicians and people who played in bands and knew a lot of people in town. Bu the thing that made people like going there is that it was grungy. It was in an old warehouse that had been a commercial laundry. And it was like a city block—it was an enormous empty warehouse, with old industrial bathrooms and old beat-up wood floors. So, our studio was carved out of the second floor of that building. We didn’t have the whole floor, but a lot of times at night, we’d use it—we’d drag mics out there. A lot of screaming vocals on the Pixies’ Come on Pilgrim were recorded out there.
And word of mouth was so important. Back then, there was a very achievable thing you could do: You could go into a studio, book time, record songs, and make a quarter-inch reel- to-reel tape that you could take to college radio stations and a few commercial alternative stations that would potentially play that tape. Y’know, it was the local ghetto show on Sunday night, but if it was really successful, you would graduate over into actually being added to the rotation. And nobody was paying payola either—it was very meritocracy- based. It was never a question of having to bribe someone or slipping a hundred-dollar bill in with a tape. They listened to it, and if they liked it, they’d play it
The first real commercial success we had was Treat Her Right—Mark Sandman’s band before Morphine. They scored a local hit that actually became a national hit [“I Think She Likes Me”], and they signed to RCA Records. All of a sudden, that
We went up the ladder from 8-track to 16-track to 24-track to two 24-track studios. And then eventually we had our own production deal with a label. We were pretty proactive about going after bands that we wanted to record, especially in the early days.
Come on Pilgrim, and I engineered it. We all kind of teamed up on it. Man, that was a real Fort Apache early golden era. People were sleeping in the other room, and we were mixing around the clock. That record really blew a lot of doors open. And at one point, WFNX put out their “Top 50 Local Songs of the Year”; and we had like thirty-eight of them!
We went up the ladder from 8-track to 16-track to 24-track to two 24-track studios. And then eventually we had our own production deal with a label. We were pretty proactive about going after bands that we wanted to record, especially in the early days. Like, I went to the Rat [the Rathskeller club] with Gary, and we saw the Pixies. We went backstage and talked to them and said, “Let’s make a record.” That didn’t always work. But it did in that case.
After Come on Pilgrim came out—which I engineered—I went to Las Vegas, and I was hanging out with some people. And they said, “You’re an engineer? Well . . . what did you do?” And I said [Come on Pilgrim], and they were like, “Wow, really? You did that?” They knew about it instantly—it had only been out a few weeks. It spread like wildfire, the equivalent of going viral.
DAVID PAJO (Slint guitarist, Tortoise bassist): I remember when we were recording Tweez, [drummer] Britt [Walford] asked [Steve Albini], “Do you think Slint will ever be popular?” And Steve—really wisely—said, “I don’t think Slint will ever be popular . . . but they’ll be influential.” And then he said that we were “the sound of the ’90s.” Which, in 1987, it sounded like the far-off future. But he was so spot-on.
Alternative for the Masses: The ’90s Alt-Rock Revolution – An Oral History is available for sale now, as Kindle, hardcover, and audio editions.
